HAA numbers as of now

After talking with Cara A. (HAA) on the phone today, we now know the following pieces of the puzzle:

HAA has about 690 Co-op-tagged alums in their records. I don't know if this includes deceased people yet... Of the 690, about 620 are "active", meaning that there are addresses for those people. The rest are considered "lost". With the list of names through 2007 given them just a few days ago, they know that there will be something like 400 additional people, who are mostly anticipated to be "active." Good stuff!

Cara will look into returning to us correct names, graduation years, and alive/deceased status, but she can't guarantee. At worst, we'll just be patient
until October when we can complete the SIG process and get full access. I hope we can implement a system by which the SIG is in fact completed and thereafter maintained...

Setting a date...

After conferring with the records and with Tyler last night, we're thinking that the reunion will be held Saturday, May 31st, 2008. It seems that all reunions of the past have been held on Saturdays, and we don't see any big reason to break that tradition. The most convenient one for alums who also want to go to their class reunions would be Saturday the 7th, post-commencement, but that won't work since all us seniors will be kicked out on Friday the 6th. So the Saturday before it is, tentatively...

Now working on the invitation...

-Rich

Good references, optimism for making contact

Jim Hogle summarized major staff/faculty people to track down from the most recent decades of the Co-op, which was wonderful. Of particular note is Margaret Handy, house administrator from 1971 - 2000 (!!). (I misinterpreted the sugar maple in the front yard of 05 dedicated to her to mean she had passed. She has not! She's in town and excited to talk with me...)

Most important: HAA is really going to help us out. When i give them the names on the Alumni Master, (with whatever graduation/Co-op year info i can manage,) they will generate and give to us mailing labels for as many as they can manage. Also in this process, they'll update their database with "lived in the Co-op" tags, making up for the slack on this since ~1995. Sweet. In October, when we hopefully complete the Shared Interest Group (SIG) application process, this will have been necessary work for getting full access to our alumni's contact info. Since we should only need to do one big mailing for the Reunion, we shouldn't need the addresses again before October. So when we get the mailing labels, we should make photocopies/scans of the sheets, just in case, but we should hopefully be able to avoid needing to back enter the addresses into a spreadsheet. Good news.

ALSO, HAA is willing to send out an email on our behalf urging alumni to get in contact (with the dudley.coop gmail account or in writing) and to respond if they're interested in forming the Co-op Shared Interest Group. We need 50 alum signatures (virtual ok). Although we can't get specific info for specific people, i'm going to see if we can't be clever and learn plenty of other useful things from these actions they'll take on our behalf:

• Which people are dead? (Most likely to be told.)
  
• Which people don't have HAA records? (Partially evident by lack of a mailing label...)
  
• Do some living people have HAA records but no mailing address? (We'd need to receive a list of names detailing this.)
  
• Does everyone with an HAA record have an @post address? If not, which don't have one? (Again, would need a list. We may need to resend the email using all of our non-@post addresses, possibly resulting in some overlap.)
• May we know who receives the email, if not their particular addresses?
• (Can't an alumnus use the post@harvard site to look up individuals one at a time?)
  
• Which names had spelling mistakes?
  
• May we know degree information for the people for whom we'll receive mailing addresses or who will receive the email? (Least likely.)

Waiting for Cara A. at HAA to call back to get this phase moving. Spoke with Lauren Brodsky yesterday, during which she instructed me on what i'd need to give to Cara. This lead to...

Spreadsheet action: i compared the names of people i'd looked up in yearbooks going back to 1991 (on the Semester Master list) against those already in the Alumni Master list; we don't want repeats. Then i added unique new ones. Then i cleaned up middle names and nicknames. There are still plenty of class lists i could type in, but i'll wait on that; i think for the short term, the "1958-1993 alumni" packet from the archive (who did this?) will be enough to corroborate/add graduation year info for Cara's purposes. Later, because of lower priority, we could use the complete class lists (of which we don't have them all and for which the Harvard Archives or the Yearbook Office might be necessary) to complete the Semester Master list.

The Alumni Master list is now up to about 1150, from 1000 before. Hooray!

Good references, optimism for making contact

Working towards a mailing

We've set a target of Sunday, March 2 for the bulk mailing. I've sent another email to Jim Hogle to follow up on our meeting. He offered to ask The Registrar himself for lists of alums, pay for the mailing, put us in touch with two people knowledgeable about Co-op history, and turn up Dudley employee records (tutors, masters, administrators, etc.) I'll wait to hear how much of this he can follow through on.

The plan is to call Cara Angelopolus and Lauren Brodsky at HAA today to see about mailing labels and mass emailing, respectively. Again, they won't give us open access to data until we're a Shared Interest Group (earliest could be October 2008), but they're willing to produce one-time batches of mailing addresses, which we can then back enter into our spreadsheets like Frisbay did 10 years ago. It would be wonderful to get all @post email addresses, (which we might be able to do by hand using the @post directory and an alum's username and password,) but if HAA can send the email from behind closed doors, we'll at least harvest accurate email address of those who respond, which could yield a significant amount of data.

Mmm, data.

Yesterday, i met with a History of Science TF, Jeremiah James, who is Co-op-minded, (applied to be a tutor many years ago!) and who is willing to help me tackle the general historical project that is our archive. Historical methods, ways of interpreting... this has basically become my thesis. And i'm thrilled to commit to learning as much as possible about my dear Co-op. Sweet. He'll come over for dinner next week to talk and see our materials, and he's actually my TF, so i'll have regular face-to-face contact with him. Seems like a wonderful and brilliant guy. Oh! In one fell swoop, i began talking with Jeremiah about this, got great advice for a paper from the professor of the class Jeremiah TFs for, and then got introduced to Everett Mendelsohn, History of Science Professor Emeritus, former Dudley House Master, and a also wonderful, interesting, and interested (in our Reunion) person! I've set up a meeting with him for next week. What a day.

Also, between yesterday and today, i scrounged up all the Communication Stewards' contact sheets i could find, for the purpose of expanding the "Semester Master" list. Meaning: i back-entered all the Co-oper data from the lists into a spreadsheet. I got the follwing done: Fall97-Spring00, Fall01-Spring03, Spring04-Spring08. Intend to do the rest using the paper records Frisbay found in the Harvard Archive 10 years ago, and by supplementing with whatever else i can find. This should suffice for about 2/3 of all years. (Some of the Frisbay paper records seem to be missing...) As i said in the email this morning to Jim Hogle, (now CC'ing Rich Cozzens, SJ Klein, Alex Kaufman, Frisbay, and Amelia Kaplan,) i'm rather confident that we at least have a near-complete list of at least names, probably above 90%. The uncertainty lies in not knowing exactly what holes Frisbay was not able to fill. But i'll have a better idea of this soon enough. (The Semester List is ambitious, also looking at house-rooms-lived-in and graduation year. From this, too, we'll obviously get complete data on semesters-in-Co-op)

I'll post again after calling HAA today.

Focusing on alumni: names, then contact info

Here are the current priorities:

• Complete an exhaustive list of Co-opers through the years, contact info aside.
• Then, contact HAA and start grapevining to get the contact info.
• At the same time, prepare the bulk-mail invitation. Let's say we have this in the mail box by Sunday, March 2.
• All the while, keep digging deeper into the archives for perspective, abstract familiarity with these people, and tips.
  

Today was a big day. I did some major organizing of the archives, and i now realize that the yearbooks may help in reconstructing lists of names. I also found many, many more reunion planning documents than i had known existed. I'll go through them soon and see if anyone else left us a printed out blog... The postcards and letters that seem to have poured in is very encouraging.

I'll seek to create a second master spreadsheet that lists, flat out, every single person who lived at each house each semester. If you lived here for 4 semesters, you'd show up 4 times on this list, rather than just once on the contact info master list. This semester master list will be

1. overkill-exhaustive with regard to accounting for each person,
2. a good model for how future communication stewards should begin to append info to the database, (to be supplemented by also updating the master contact list and then seeking out ever-more current contact info from all alums,) and
3. a useful tool for networking (with a few button presses, one can generate a list of something like 40 people in temporal proximity to any given Co-oper, which can help to jog one's memory or produce a list of names someone can be responsible for helping track down through the grapevine.)

Perhaps it would be good to buy a USB key to store Co-op electronic documents. Paper is better for many things, including archiving and the Sutra, but this contact info is surely better handled using a spreadsheet. Archived emails and digital photographs might be stored on the USB key as well.

I wrote back to some alums today. Responses to the initial email sent from dudley.coop@gmail.com were few, but they've now been addressed. There is also the dudcoop@hcs.harvard.edu address that's been languishing in neglect for over a year now. A few proactive alums anticipated the 50th Reunion event and wrote to us at the latter address expressing a willingness to help, MONTHS ago, and we weren't there to listen!! Argh. They're wonderful though, and i'm working on reestablishing contact, hoping they're still excited to help.

Co-op superstars Frisbay and Alex Kaufman turn out to be in the Boston area and willing to help in various degrees! Perhaps they'll come to a dinner meeting next week, along with SJ. Amelia Kaplan has not responded yet, but in theory she is receiving our email conversations.

Another thing that occurred to me today is: publicity. Co-oper Eva Rosenberg's father edits Harvard Alumni Magazine. In addition to him, we should get the Gazette and Crimson to write stuff. And Alexandra Monti is supposed to put a note about our event in the Reunion Week bulletin that will detail the schedule to alumni. But who else? We should milk this opportunity for all it's worth to the Co-op's long-term security.

More tomorrow...

What's been done so far...

Ok, co-planner Tyler Neill ('08) here. Sam (SJ) Klein has also kicked in plenty of effort as well, bringing his experience planning the 46th Reunion. We began writing a few things down as we did them, but the Co-op's record-keeping habits are not what they used to be, what with the ephemeral nature of electronic communication. (Heck, we don't use the message board or the physical Sutra anymore!) So, the hard-copy log didn't quite happen. Anyhow, here's a rough timeline of what we've done to date on getting this event together.

Early November 2007

• A group of Co-opers attend the NASCO conference in Ann Arbor and stir up their forward-thinking juices for the Co-op. 50th Reunion event is mentioned, in association with reestablishing ties with alumni.

Mid-November

• I happen to notice a small note from SJ about planning the Reunion pinned to a bulletin board in the dining room. Current Co-opers are not conditioned to look there for mundane messages, (mostly jokes or curiosities,) so luck lends a hand here. I email SJ, and the ball begins to roll. Begin to think about a newsletter/invite and getting snail mail addresses in order. (Co-opers alums have not been tracked for some years, so this is uncharted territory for us here.) Mention of postage costs.
• An email goes out to the Co-op list to recruit volunteer help. (The email list is our main way of communicating.) A number speak up, but I don't have anything to delegate yet, so it's a bit like a false alarm.

Late November

• SJ and i meet over dinner. We exchange pleasantries, talk about changes in the Co-op, and toss out initial ideas. We decide to meet again soon, hopefully with more people.
  
• An email goes out to a small number of very recent Co-op alums suspected of being within a reasonable radius of Boston, inviting them to dinner to talk about the event. Proportionally small response.
  

Early December

• The Reunion is brought up at a Co-op meeting. Awareness is officially raised. (Note: i'm on leave from Harvard during this semester, which makes me feel somewhat like an outsider presenting at the meeting, as if i'm bringing in this idea 'from the outside'.) With little details, that's about all that happens.
  
• The second planning dinner happens: just me and SJ again. We delve into the Reunion planning binders and scrapbooks, from the 30th, 35th, and 40th events. They're wonderful for perspective. We brainstorm about how what tasks there are and will be to be done, how many people we'll need to pitch in, and what needs to get done sooner rather than later. Contacting alumni is the clear priority. (SJ possibly hints at a spreadsheet of alum info...) We decide that getting in touch with Dudley House and the Harvard Alumni Association asap would be good.

Mid-December

• Another Co-op meeting. Armed with the preliminary task-list that came out of SJ and my talks, the scope of the project is made more apparent to Co-opers. Another request for help; more of a response.
  
• SJ reveals the spreadsheet, which contains nearly 1000 people, most of whom seem to be Co-op. The info has many holes, and the affiliations of people on the list are not always clear, although it's a great start. At first glance, only about 140 have email addresses, which are especially outdated. (Note: there are actually a few more email address in the spreadsheet at this point in time, somewhat hidden in unexpected columns, but we don't inspect carefully enough to realize it.) SJ says its info is for people through circa year 2000.
  
• We decide that sending a mass email before Christmas would be good.

Late December

• We collaboratively draft the newsletter/invite through the Co-op "Wiki". Holidays interfere...
• At another Co-op meeting, we tentatively decide that Reunion tasks can perhaps best be spearheaded by a Stewardship position temporary for this spring semester. The Reunion Steward.
  

Early January 2008

• ...and the email editing drags awfully...
  

Mid-January

• Initial contact is made with Dudley House: Carvina Williams, Undergraduate Coordinator. (Note: Dudley House has only an interim Resident Dean at this time, and she does not seem especially equipped to help us with this issue at this time. So, we go to Carvina first.) She is not optimistic about Dudley House having records of its students, much less those particular students who lived at the Co-op. Not just talking contact info—I mean NO records. Not completely deterred, i plan on meeting with House Masters. (Unbeknownst to me until later, SJ talks with Carvina sometime within the next few weeks and gets more encouragement than i did about Dudley financial support for the event.)
  
• Initial contact is made with HAA: Lauren Brodsky, "Assistant Director, Clubs & Shared Interest Groups (SIGs)". She explains that the HAA has a huge amount of info on alumni, including records of WHO lived in the Co-op, at least until 1995. (HAA relies on the Co-op to give it lists of its residents, and then HAA simply makes a note on alumni database entries "tagging" them as having been Co-opers. This apparently ceased in 1995, for reasons unknown. We are currently making a concerted effort to explore the archives, perhaps to be able to reconstruct a more complete. This is what i fall asleep fantasizing about these days...) HOWEVER, HAA will not necessarily GIVE us this info automatically. We (the Co-op) must first incorporate ourselves into a "Shared Interest Group", a many-month process, and then we will have free access to the Co-op-tagged entries as well as any people we can convince them were Co-opers since 1995. Until then, the best we are offered is a one-time printing of mailing labels, produced with a combination of the HAA's tagged-records and whatever list we can construct ourselves, (starting with the 1000-person spreadsheet SJ provided.) Overall, though, Lauren seems genuinely excited to help us connect to alumni.
  

Late January

• A third call goes out to the Co-op email list (sent while i'm in Missouri) asking for help in reconstructing a list of former Co-opers. Responses are encouraging, but still, concrete tasks are in short supply. (Retrospective note: perhaps it would have been better to delegate even fuzzy tasks, like "figure out who lived here within the past ten years?") (Personal note: i hate delegating.) From Missouri, i begin reconstructing a list of recent years' Co-op alums. Tutor Allison Kuklok offers the resident lists from the years she was around.
• I created a Gmail email address: dudley.coop@gmail.com. This will be used for Reunion correspondence and perhaps more in the future. (Note: the dudcoop@fas.harvard.edu address still exists but it horribly neglected. And Google provides so many other abilities.)
  

Early February

• The email/newsletter FINALLY goes out! (More difficult than expected to convert from Wiki to email format. Ugh, the Luddite in me says.) Ominously, a huge number of the emails bounce, seemingly because of broken email addresses. One actual email response right away...(two more come later, by the time of this post.)
  
• The Co-op cleanup and all-day meeting happens. We elect Rich the Reunion Steward. He is charged with the vague duty of coordinating Reunion planning activity.
  
• I'm elected "Historian," a reconceived Scribe. (Scribes as of late have been minutes-takers, and not necessarily diligent ones. They have occasionally produced yearbooks. There exists no familiarity in the current Co-op with the archive material. Also, for example, we have long moved past the hard-copy Sutra; in it's place, the WikiSutra has weakly served stripped-down purposes.)
• Rich and I make it our mission to have a complete list of alumni by the end of the year, to be gathered in the process of inviting folks to the Reunion. We'll also need a system to maintain the spreadsheet, as that seems to be the way to do it efficiently in the future.
• Rich, slipping right into his role, discovers the forwarding-address binders in the computer lab desks. We eventually figure out that one, (the red one,) was an exact printout of info in the spreadsheet we have from SJ, but that it also has handwritten additions from alums who have stopped by and been kind enough to update their info. Amazing Communication Steward Paul's binder also has plenty of additional info.
• We contact Dudley House Master Jim Hogle to set up a meeting.
  

Mid-Februrary

• For the purpose of quick and collaborative access, Rich makes the alumni spreadsheet into a Google spreadsheet Document. The binders' info is plugged into the spreadsheet.
• Richa and i meet with Jim Hogle. He has such a good number of suggestions, i've attached a document debriefing the meeting [[ATTACH FILE]]. The main points:
• He will help us contact the Registrar for House lists. He will check Dudley records for Co-opers and tutors/masters' info.
• He will have Dudley kick in $ for mailing postage.
• Dudley has 20,000 alumni, so we should stay Co-op-focused.
• He recommends we get grapevining.
  
• Rich and i follow up on contacts Lauren Brodsky (HAA) had suggested.
• Alexandra Monti (HAA): possibly can help us advertise for the event in the alumni bulletin. (NOTE: Current Co-oper Eva Rosenberg's father edits the Harvard Alumni Magazine and is willing to help, too! Whoa.)
• Cara Angelopulos (HAA): possibly can get us the one-time mailing labels (see above).
• SJ makes an effort to involve past super-Co-opers Amelia Kaplan (writer of the tremendous "Don't Spit in the Soup" Hist&Lit thesis on the Co-op), Frisbe Thomasson, and Alex Kaufman.
  
• I find out from the Harvard Yearbook people that we can get access to all old yearbooks and that the books distinguish graduating seniors, which might come in handy for placing Co-op alumni in their respective moments in time.
• Rich implements the Google Blog. Here it is. That catches us up to the present.
• As i write, Alex Kaufman writes back and will soon come to visit!...
  

In the next post, i will summarize what we think the next steps are...

A first post...

We have now been planning for the upcoming 50th reunion for a few weeks, but without recording our process of planning...

We are in awe of the amazing hard-copy records from past reunions here in the file cabinet, so in imitation here is a blog to record what it takes to throw a party for the "golden jubilee" of the Dudley Co-op here at 3 Sacramento St. and 1705 Mass. Ave.

Here goes...

Richard Cozzens '08
Reunion Steward